So Help Me God, I Can Honestly Only Run to Show Tunes

Go ahead, run to Drake. But he’s got nothing on Broadway.

By
Grace Perry

Oct 12, 2018

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Even in peak shape, every runner knows that brief moment of hopelessness mid-workout. Our legs are drained, arms flinging out of desperation. Am I going to feel this way for the rest of my life?we wonder; our basic understanding of the passage of time has gone out to lunch. It’s dark. We need a pick-me-up. We need a kick in the ass. And, if you’re me, what you really need is to hear the “Tonight” quintet from West Side Story.

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At this point in my life, I can pretty much only run to show tunes. And lift weights, and do eight minutes of abs, for that matter. It’s become a complete, almost Pavlovian dependence. Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” does absolutely nothing to get me in the zone; the Original Broadway Cast recording of the prologue to Into the Woods, however, gets me 150 percent cranked up.

Let’s back up. I wasn’t a theater kid in high school—how could I audition for the fall musical during cross country season? But I’ve always been a quiet Broadway fan. A singing in the car, blasting in my headphones, watching Singing in The Rain on Turner Classic Movies with my mom, internally fangirling over Bernadette Peters kind of musical theater fan, but not a performer myself.

Over the past couple years, I’ve found that Broadway offers an incredibly practical solution to my track brain’s annoying habit of constantly calculating my pace. I no longer run competitively, nor with a strict training schedule, nor am I even close to being in the shape I was once in.

While I’m fine with that, my nagging, competitive 22-year-old self still lurks in my brain. She emerges mid-workout simply to compare my current 28-year-old splits/mileage with those of when I was in PR shape. It’s not cool. To avoid my self-inflicted harsh comparisons, I typically run without a watch, and try to take weird detours so I can’t exactly calculate my distance for reference. But still my track brain always wants to calculate time while running—how much time has elapsed, how much is left, and, worst of all, my too-slow mile pace.

And music can add to this madness: Pop songs, while super fun to run to, give me an easy metric to gauge the passage of time while running. Let’s take, for example, Nick Jonas’ timeless banger, “Jealous - remix” feat. Tinashe. Like most pop songs, the “Jealous” remix is about 3 minutes and 30 seconds. That allows me to easily keep track of how much time has elapsed, how much I have left, and even an approximation of my pace during that song.

Let’s say I run one “Jealous,” and still have over a minute left before I get to the half-mile marker—I’ll know I’m running over 9-minute pace. I’ll inevitably be down on myself for being as tired as I am, because I’m comparing myself to my 22-year-old self. Who does this? Crazy type-A runners, that’s who. At the other end of the spectrum are podcasts, but I can usually hear myself wheezing over the pod chatter, which, yikes.

Enter an unexpected happy medium: Broadway.

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Show tunes are truly the ¿porque no los dos? of running music: they have the consuming storyline of podcasts, and the multi-harmony chorus to jam out to. The blend of narrative and catchiness warp the passage of time, successfully guiding my brain away from the task at hand. Running length totally various from song to song, so I can’t approximate my pace like I can with pop songs. So on the one hand, there are structural elements to musical theater that, on a rational, mathematical level, allows me to function better athletically.

Also, Broadway is just plain good, OK? Have you ever even tried a to Eliza Hamilton absolutely murdering “Burn”? Or gotten into the zone for a 5K to “Light My Candle” from RENT? Or cranked out the last stretch of a long run to the “One Day More” from Les Mis? Obviously, I highly recommend it.

I want to sing along, but my lungs won’t allow that, so I instead sing with my body.

When my heart rate is elevated mid-workout, I feel extremely vulnerable to emotional triggers, and often times an emotional lift is exactly what I need to reinvigorate my tired legs. And the whole point of effective musical theater is how it clinches our emotions; the characters are so overcome by feeling that they must communicate in song. Musical theater is incredibly good at appealing to our raw emotions! And it’s infectious: When “I Could Have Danced All Night” from the 1964 film version of My Fair Lady floats into my headphone, my heart thuds with a little more drama, my blood pumps harder, and more oxygen finds its way to my exhausted extremities.

I want to sing along, but my lungs won’t allow that, so I instead sing with my body: a pep in my stride, shaking out my hands to the beat, reconnecting my brain to my body in that moment of mid-run exhaustion. A swell of strings offers more of a mid-run pick me up than any coach with a stopwatch ever could.

Maybe when my heart rate is up, I allow my brain to indulge a fantasy version of myself, who sings her emotions on stage, loud and unabashed. Then the run ends, the endorphins settle into my system, and I press pause on my playlist until the next workout. But if anyone ever makes a biopic about me, please consider this my official request for the workout montage to be scored to “One” from A Chorus Line.

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